Social Network Portability

Attended the Dconstruct conference last week and as last time I'll try to process the information I got from it over the next few weeks. As I am also attending BathCamp next week I will start with the talks that have any kind of potential connection with my BathCamp presentation.

Tantek Çelik gave an interesting talk on Social Network Portability a brief summary of which is provided by Tom Hume.

The point Tom makes that there may be instances where we don't want to share aspects of ourselves between different social sites is one that immediately came to my mind also. In my case an excellent example is when using some social sites for language learning. I don't see this a significant barrier though, unless I am mistaken in the application side of things, a profile page that you create on a social site is not going to be able to make those connections or allow others to make them unless you provide the initial link into your social network, it will still be easy to create completly separate identities. Also the connection to your identities on other social sites will be limited to public information.

The basic aims that Tantek initially expressed certainly need to be addressed, my own AHA moment recently came whilst using the microblogging service at identi.ca, thanks to the openmicroblogging specification I was able to follow a user on http://openmicroblogger.com/ simply by adding the url of his profile page. The exchange of avatar icons and who is following, being followed by who happened automatically (try doing that on Twitter).

I guess at that moment the microblogging AHA moment sums up my interest in this area (although I have not looked under the hood I don't thing it uses the same technology Tantek was discussing), unless I am doing something at work that is impacted by Social Network Portability then I will leave the implementation and specifications to others and wait to see how it affects me. I have installed the Operator Firefox extension for microformats and so far it doesn't appear that much if anything I am using online is using them (or if it is, then it doesn't impact what I am doing).

Information on the technologies that Tantek discussed can be found here on the microformat wiki.

BathCamp Presentation

For the last two and a half years I have been learning Chinese, for the last two and a half years I have also been learning about learning especially how the learning landscape is changing thanks to the web technologies.

Learning Chinese has become my muse for learning about new web technologies. My job has involved me in many different aspects of developing web applications (possibly too many) and a while ago I had totally lost touch with the front end and more importantly how to "use" the emergent technologies. Because I don't feel you can really understand something until you can use it and because I was interested in learning a language I decided to learn a language as much as possible via the internet.

I like to write down my thoughts sometimes especially to refine ideas, when I came to think about a presentation for Bathcamp the obvious thing to do was to write down anything I feel I have learned so far and then pull out the more interesting points(in my opinion) for a short spoken presentation. Whatever happens the writings will be useful to me in the future, I have found it very useful to review what I wrote about Dconstruct last year.

I tend to write in more than one place and may have some other resources to add so I am going to try to pull all the background material to the presentation in a twine. By the time I make the short spoken presentation (or at least shortly afterwards); hopefully everything underpinning it will be available on the twine.

Dconstruct and Bathcamp

Interesting couple of weeks ahead, this week I am attending the Dconstruct conference in Brighton and the following weekend I will be attending Bathcamp. Attendance of Dconstruct last year provoked lots of thought and posts about Internet related matters but I suspect that this year Bathcamp will generate or refine even more.

I strongly suspect that Bathcamp will generate more this year, primarily because being an unconference I will be making my own small presentation, this requires a lot of thought....

This post will be a small part of the background to my upcoming Bathcamp presentation.

BathCamp

Short post this, but there will be more. I am signed up to attend Bathcamp later in the summer and looking forward to it, it will be my first attendance of a barcamp style un-conference. I am not entirely sure what to expect, but I am sure it will be interesting and well worth the time.

Twine has started opening little bits to the public now, I quite like a few elements of Twine but there are some things that don't seem to work very well still, building a Twine of language learning resources is going OK, I am building a Bathcamp Twine but already it seems more work than it should be (I am going to have to make a logo for it, add lots of links and text by hand etc. etc.).

Now I wondering how to make a presentation for Bathcamp, I guess as much of my internet interaction that is not work related has been to do with learning Chinese via the internet this will be the theme, there are a lot of web technology goodies in there I just have to shake them out and dust them off. Trouble is I always leave these things to the last minute. Emergency plan is to juggle whilst harmonic throat singing (Tuvan style), I hope it doesn't come to that...